20,000 years ago expanding ice caps reveal land bridge across the Bering
Strait between Siberia and Alaska.
People migrated across North America and down through Central and South America
and developed many distinctive cultures and societies.
Some peoples turned from hunting and gathering to food production (maize, beans,
squash, sunflowers, cassava) and developed sedentary communities.

NORTH AMERICA
Numerous Native American societies flourished perhaps as early as 14,000 years
ago. Between 500 and 1500 several societies in the American southwest--the Mogollon,
Hohokam, and the Anasazideveloped complex towns and small cities
with trade networks, complex religious calendars, and adobe buildings. Societies
in the Mississippi River valley also developed highly organized towns
and small cities. However, in the Americas as a whole only Mexico and Peru
developed complex civilizations that created large cities and managed vast empires.

MESOAMERICA (Central America, Mexico)
Extremely complex and sophisticated civilizations developed beginning with the
Olmec and ending with Cortezs conquest of the Aztec.

The Olmec (1000 BC) are the mother culture of all of the Mesoamerican
civilizations. They called themselves the Jaguar People. Evidence
suggests that they were not a violent or warring civilization, although they,
like most Mesoamerican civilizations, performed human sacrifice for religious
purposes. They developed a great amount of wealth, impressive technical efficiency,
and beautiful art. The Olmec are the first culture in Mesoamerica to develop
a ruling class: priests ruled and merchants were held in high regard. This culture
produced great stone buildings, pyramids, stone heads, and jade carvings. They
laid the foundations for religion, art, architecture, ball games, mathematics,
astronomy, calendars, and a hieroglyphic writing system for subsequent Mesoamerican
civilizations. They built massive stone heads. Some think the heads represent
West Africans.

Teotihuacan (200 AD) was a great city that attracted people, including
specialized craftspeople, from all over Mexico. They built a magnificent pyramid.
The population may have been as high as 125,000 and by 500 AD this was the worlds
sixth largest city. No one yet knows just which Mesoamerican culture developed
this great city.

The Maya (500 AD) developed an extremely complex civilization with great
Mayan cities (like Chichen Itza) with temples, palaces, and astronomical observatories.
They had an economy based on agriculture, craft specialization, and long-distance
trade. Mayan society was rigidly stratified (hierarchical), and like the Olmec,
they were ruled by priest-kings and had an elite class of merchants and craftsmen.
They developed very sophisticated mathematics, art, and architecture. No one
today knows for sure why this great civilization declined around 1000 AD.

The Toltec (1000 AD) were a war-like people who expanded rapidly throughout
Mexico and beyond. At the top of their society was a warrior aristocracy which
attained mythical proportions in the eyes of Central Americans long after the
demise of their power. The Toltecs expanded the cult of Quetzalcoatl, the "Soveriegn
Plumed Serpent," and created a mythology around the figure. In Toltec legend,
Quetzalcoatl was the creator of humanity and a warrior-god that had been driven
away, but would return some day.

The Aztec (1300) In 1325 they founded the town of Tenochtitlan
which is now the site modern-day Mexico City . In the 15th century these great
warriors and builders ruled the second largest empire in the Americas. In the
early 16th century Hernan Cortez led the Spanish conquest that devastated
the resistant Aztec and signaled Spains commitment to carving out a permanent
hold on the New World. With a force of 600, Cortez marshalled 50,000 disgruntled
Aztec neighbors and captured the Aztec leader, Monteczuma, and gained access
to trhe captial, Technoctitlan. Still conquest was not easy as the Aztec continued
to resist.

SOUTH AMERICA (Peru)
Peru was the center of South American civilization. Recent findings suggest
that Peru had great cities and civilizations as early as 2500 BC (at the same
time of the other first civilizations on the planet: Mesopotamia, Egypt, Sudan,
India, and China).

The Inca began to dominate the many societies in this region around 1000
AD.
They were an ancient people, but had been subject to other urban culture in
the region throughout their early history. They began to expand their influence
in the 12th century and by the early 16th century, they controlled more territory
than any other people had done in American history. The empire consisted of
over one million individuals, spanning a territory stretching from Ecuador to
northern Chile. Conquered people were required to pay a labor tax to the state;
with this labor tax, the Incas built an astonishing network of roads and terraced
farmlands throughout the Andes.
The Inca cultivated corn and potatoes, and raised llama and alpaca for food
and for labor. Of all the urbanized people of the Americas, the Incas were the
most brilliant engineers. They performed amazing feats of fitting gigantic stones
together and designed huge earth-drawings that still exist today. They built
roads through the mountains with tunnels and bridges. They also built aqueducts
to their cities as the Romans had. And of all ancient peoples, they were the
most advanced in medicine and surgery. The language they spoke was Quechua which
they imposed on all the peoples they conquered. Because of this, Quechua is
still spoken among large numbers of Native Americans throughout the Andes. They
had no writing system at all, but they kept records on various colored knotted
cords.

At its height, the Inca civilization crashed into the European expansion. In
1521, Herman Cortés conquered the Aztecs in Mexico; this conquest inspired
Francisco Pizzarro to invade the Incas in 1531. He only had two hundred
soldiers, however, he convinced the ruler of the Inca, Atahualpa, to come to
a conference. When Atahualpa arrived, Pizzarro kidnapped him and killed several
hundred of his family and followers. Atahualpa tried to ransom himself, but
Pizzarro tried to use him as a puppet ruler. When that failed, Pizzarro simply
executed him in 1533. Over the next thirty years the Spanish struggled against
various insurrections, but, with the help of native allies, they finally gained
control of the Inca empire in the 1560's.